Cadis Inc.

Thomas S Kavanagh

William C Heiny

John D Motycka

Brooke E Terpening

Samuel S Pendleton

Christopher W Beall

Kenneth A Traut

Thomas D Smallwood

A database management system is disclosed having an object oriented representation of information describing characteristics of instances organized in a hierarchical structure that may be logically represented as a tree structure. The hierarchical structure includes a parent-child/class-subclass structure. The internal representation of an instance is dependent upon information that is locally available from a class to which that instance belongs plus inherited attributes from a parent class. A class is represented as a class object having a handle. The class object has a parent handle associated with it that identifies the parent class of the class object. The class object has a subclass list associated with it that identifies the handles of the classes that are subclasses of the class object. The class object has an attribute list associated with it that includes a list of handles which may be used to identify the attributes of the class object. A class object also includes a subtree instance count which represents the total number of instances that belong to that class object plus the total number of instances that are present in all of the descendants of the class object, i.e., the total number of instances that are present in that branch of the hierarchical tree structure. A graphical user interface is provided in which the hierarchical tree structure is displayed in a window showing classification structure, and a class or instance can be selected by clicking on the graphical representation of the class in the window showing classification structure. Attributes of the selected class or instance are simultaneously displayed in a window showing attribute information, which includes fields to the right of each attribute in which search criteria for that attribute may be entered. The subtree instance count is also displayed simultaneously to provide feedback to the user as to how many instances satisfy the current query, in order to facilitate guided iterative queries of the database.

Object oriented database management system

The present invention is an improvement upon an object oriented database management system and provides a method and apparatus for a user to visually compare attribute values of instances retrieved in a search in a way that highlights attribute values that do not match or are not equal. The present invention provides a method and apparatus for determining which of the attributes are not equal or do not match, and which attribute values are the same for all of the instances that are retrieved by a search. A method and apparatus is provided for visually indicating such determinations in a way that is immediately understandable by a user.

Method and system for comparing attributes in an object-oriented

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for concurrency control in an object oriented database management system having a plurality of users accessing the system at the same time, and allowing editing of the database while other users are concurrently searching the database. The present invention may be advantageously used in a client/server architecture comprising a knowledge base client and a knowledge base server. In a preferred embodiment, the knowledge base server may include an object oriented lock manager, a dynamic class manager, a connection manager, a query manager, a handle manager, a units manager, a database manager, and a file manager. The concurrency control mechanism includes a lock holder table. The present invention provides a method and apparatus for providing concurrency control in an object oriented database managemant system using only three types of lock modes: a class share lock, a tree update lock, and a tree exclusive lock. In a preferred embodiment, a fourth type of lock mode may be provided: a tree share lock. The present invention provides a particularly advantageous concurrency control mechanism for an object oriented database management system that is read oriented.

Method and apparatus for concurrency in an object oriented database

Growing community of inventors

Boulder, CO, United States of America

Thomas S Kavanagh